Management - Leadership

To promote accountability, productivity, and shared learning, many organizations create open work environments and gather reams of data on how individuals spend their time. A few years ago, HBS professor Ethan Bernstein set out to find empirical evidence that such approaches improve organizational performance.

Few companies measure whether the design of their workspaces helps or hurts performance, but they should. The authors have collected data that capture individuals' interactions, communications, and location information.

Businesses constantly innovate to create new value--but unless they also focus on how they capture value, they won't realize maximum benefit from their breakthroughs. And even avid innovators often have a blind spot when it comes to value capture. Managers need to think about value capture more imaginatively and as a matter of course.

The best way for companies to improve the lives of the world's poorest people--those at the bottom of the pyramid--is to focus first on doing good business, not just on doing good.

The technology industry has a big problem with diversity, one that seems to be getting worse: In 1991 women held 37% of computing jobs; today they hold only 26%.

It's not easy to recover from a big career disappointment such as getting fired or being passed over for a promotion. Many people sink into anger or denial, blaming situational factors or company politics.

HBR fictionalized case studies present dilemmas faced by leaders in real companies and offer solutions from experts.

In the second episode of Halt and Catch Fire, AMC's new show about the birth of personal computing, the protagonist encourages his two recruits--a hardware engineer and a coder--to ignore a recent setback and keep working to build a new kind of PC.

No one who has done business in China will be surprised to learn that relationships with government matter. Executives in China devote a substantial amount of time to interaction with government, even with the country's ongoing economic liberalization.

Ryan W. Buell, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School; Tami Kim, a doctoral student at HBS; and Chia-Jung Tsay, an assistant professor at University College London, set up four scenarios in a real cafeteria for two weeks.